Eamonn Sweeney: Let's move away from this pursuit of English players and concentrate on nurturing our own

Declan Rice. Photo: Sportsfile

Eamonn Sweeney

Why does the Englishman Declan Rice want to play for England? It's a mystery, isn't it? If only we had some hint as to why the Londoner is contemplating the drastic step of playing international football for his home country.

Hopefully Rice will do the decent thing and declare for England, thus exposing once and all the foolishness of the FAI's find-another-Englishman policy. At this stage our lowly standing in the international game even removes the pragmatic justification for the pursuit of Englishmen with Irish ancestors.

None of the guys we've taken on board are so good that their absence couldn't be compensated for by the increase in cohesion and motivation which could result from a side filled with players who've always wanted to play for Ireland and don't regard the green jersey as a consolation prize.

The bad faith implicit in our current policy is demonstrated by the two most popular responses to Rice's suggestion that our relationship was getting too serious too soon so he'd like to cool things down for a bit.

First you had the guys who decided to personally abuse the teenager. This kind of thing always reminds me of the time Cat Stevens, in his new Islamic Yusuf incarnation, played Vicar Street and made the fatal mistake of playing a load of new material. Cue a shout from the crowd, "Play 'Peace Train', you fucking prick."

Cat didn't play 'Peace Train' and it's unlikely that, 'Play for Ireland you fucking prick', is a winning argument either. Jack Grealish got the same treatment when he resisted our advances but even more sickening was the tsunami of smug Irish gloating which greeted every subsequent career setback or off-field misadventure by the player. It was as though wanting to play for England was some kind of unforgivable moral lapse.

The other approach is to tell Rice that he'd be daft to declare for England because they mightn't cap him at all whereas we'd fire the things at him. Essentially we're telling the player that as he's not good enough for England, Ireland will have to do. How the mighty have fallen. Once we chanted, 'You'll never beat the Irish', at the old enemy. Now our secondary status is a USP.

Surely the sensible option for Rice is to back his ability and find out how good he can be. Anyone who becomes a Premier League player while still in his teens is entitled to suspect there might be a bit more left in the tank.

One reason for the ferocity of the reaction to Grealish and Rice's supposed treachery is that Irish fans know deep down that most of the English-born players who declare for us do so because they're not good enough to win an England cap. Grealish and Rice were sufficiently talented to make us pretend otherwise.

Yet when both realised how good they were, the England route beckoned. For all our crowing, Grealish, still just 22, will be capped for England. So will Rice if he fulfils his potential. Essentially Ireland tried to play a kind of con trick, trapping them in our colours forever before they could get away. We have no grounds for complaint.

The problem with our dependence on players with Irish grandparents (and how tenuous a link is that when you think of it?) is that it functions as a kind of get-out clause that prevents the FAI from fully concentrating on the development of home-grown talent. Our most consistent international players of recent years, Seamus Coleman, James McClean and Wes Hoolahan, all came through the League of Ireland, but domestic soccer has been allowed to languish by the powers that be. Dundalk's 2016 European heroics have not been repeated. Heavy defeats for the Lilywhites and for Cork City this season tell a sad story about where the League is at the moment: 39th in Europe, six places behind Moldova and eight behind Liechtenstein.

A restructuring of our schoolboy system, which was widely opposed by prominent figures in the area, might not have been carried out in such a cavalier fashion if we didn't place such emphasis on picking up young players who don't make it to the England senior set-up and shamefully poaching the best Catholic players from Northern Ireland's underage international sides. This is not a sustainable route to success.

Declan Rice should opt for England. If he isn't capped by Gareth Southgate, there's still Ireland. There's always a céad míle fáilte in this perpetual haven for underachieving Englishmen.

The Last Word

If the FAI’s attitude to the question of international eligibility is ethically dubious, the IRFU’s is downright indefensible. Former drug cheat Gerbrandt Grobler claims he was on the verge of being offered a three-year contract and a chance to play for this country before the furore about his doping record blew up.

Now that he has signed for Gloucester he’s set his international sights elsewhere. “If Eddie Jones came calling, I wouldn’t turn it down,” revealed the man who is South African by birth and a citizen of the world by the grace of rugby’s relaxed eligibility rules.

What a pity that scoundrel Paul Kimmage drew attention to Grobler’s past, thus denying the Afrikaanse Hoër Seunskool past pupil a chance to forge an international career with Ireland and be capped ahead of the likes of Ultan Dillane and Tadhg Beirne.

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In the story ‘Silver Blaze’, Sherlock Holmes ascribed great significance to the curious fact that a dog had not barked in the night-time. This week’s mute canines are the Mayo footballers. Stephen Rochford’s resignation after what he feels is unfair treatment at the hands of the county board might have been expected to draw a response from the players.

He did, after all, get the job after a player revolt deposed his predecessors and was regarded as their choice. But while the board have been criticised by Mayo supporters for their treatment of the boss there’s not a word from those players. It’s almost as if . . . but no, this couldn’t be . . . they don’t mind seeing the back of this manager as well. All very curious.

The Mayo County Board were once publicly up in arms with me for what they perceived as unwarranted criticism of Rochford. Well lads, I just slagged him off. You’ve stabbed him in the back.

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A fascinating programme in the BBC Horizon science series about the effects of colour demonstrated that in combat sports the performer in the red corner has a distinct advantage over their opponent in blue. In two-thirds of close Olympic Tae Kwon Do bouts the competitor wearing red got the nod.

Here’s where it gets really interesting. When Tae Kwon Do judges were shown footage of close matches between fighters in red and blue, they normally picked red as the winner. But when the footage was digitally manipulated and the colours of the fighters swapped they still picked red, even though they’d previously selected the same fighter as the loser.

Another experiment which involved footballers taking penalties while wearing different coloured jerseys showed that those wearing red tended to be less nervous than the others. Red is your only man apparently. Maybe a change of club nickname from ‘the Bit O’Red’ to ‘the Very Large Amount O’Red’ is what’s needed to send Sligo Rovers zooming up the table.